“WE ARE RAPIDLY heading toward a world of brain transparency, in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will,” Duke University bioethicist Nita A. Farahany declares in The Battle for Your Brain. As a defense against this neuro-surveillance, her timely book argues for a right to cognitive liberty that includes “mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination”—a right that allows us to track and hack our own brains but bars us from trespassing on other minds.
We face a choice, Farahany suggests: We can have a comprehensive surveillance-and-control dystopia or a world where individuals can choose to use devices and drugs that help them “work and learn smarter and faster, cure us of addiction and depression, and maybe even alleviate human suffering.”
On the surveillance
